Varieties of WordPress Software Usage for Building Different Types of Websites

posted by Archie @ 5:46 AM

August 29, 2010

WordPress is a perfect blogging script, which has become very popular due to its user-friendliness. Many people, however, do not use it in any other way than for a blog or a newsfeed. We made another research on WP and found out that this software can be used for a number of other purposes. The websites below are built on the WordPress platform and enhanced with customized themes and plugins. This is an independent research, the websites are not strictly classified – we have picked those, which were built using WP in the most unusual way.

Build a Review Site

Let’s say you are interested in cinema, music or videos. You are likely to have your own opinion on all that. And most probably, you are intended to share your views and build a community around it. In this case you might take a look at http://typographica.org/ site owners. They deal with typographic design and make reviews of different fonts and type books. The way the website is built allows everyone to register with the site and gain Author or Contributor privileges for posting.

Build a Personal Website

If you want to have a personal website, but Facebook or Live Journal is not enough for you – build a WordPress-based website to share your ideas, thoughts and latest achievements in a newsfeed way. Such solution would fit those who are connected with art, sports or some social activities. One of the websites to look at is http://www.jefffinley.org – a personal site of a designer and artist, who partially deals with Internet marketing.

Place your Portfolio

If you are a designer or photographer or anyone else, who does their job well and has something to share, you should pick a portfolio to represent your best works. Many people install some gallery script in such cases, but WordPress can cope with this task just as good. If you look at http://lonnroth.info you will understand that a gallery has nothing to do with a well-built portfolio website.

Build a Gallery

When talking about galleries, we can’t neglect the fact that depending on the goal and the way you would like to have your content represented, even an online gallery may be created without using a gallery script. Taking http://cssremix.com as an example we clearly see, that a WordPress-based gallery is ways better, as it allows to lay out more image thumbnails, linked to real websites.

Open an Online Store

If you are running a small online business, a sophisticated and therefore expensive e-commerce software may not be needed for you, at least for now. That is where you can use WordPress to reach your goal. With WordPress enhanced with some of the E-commerce plug-ins you can run a website to sell your goods from. Here is the nice example of such a website: http://www.carmats.com.

Additional information and sources

WordPress community keeps growing. There are more and more plugins, themes and extensions released. Both developers and end users are much interested in making WP a tool, which would become one of the easiest sitebuilders known. The websites reviewed above are not all we found, but they are the ones, which drew our attention most, since we ourselves deal with both WordPress hosting and hosting of E-commerce and Gallery websites. This research lets us understand that a single script, if flavored with enthusiasm can do more, than usually expected. If you are interested in what else WordPress can do, have a look at http://www.webdesignerwall.com/trends/30-untypical-wordpress-sites/ and http://www.ndesign-studio.com/blog/best-wordpress-sites. Additionally, you can always follow updates on official WP site: http://wordpress.org/showcase/.